Early in July of 2011, in the midst of all our Live Blogs on The Bachelorette, a friend of the site who happens to work for Disney (parent company of ABC) mentioned that she could probably get some passes to the live season finale of the show, if we were interested. So obviously I had to fly to SoCal to take her up on the offer, right?

True story: before December, I took one vacation day at my ‘real’ job. It was to go see a bunch of meatheads argue about why they’d been dumped.

I’d never been to a real show taping before. I knew what the show what end up looking like on TV, but I was excited to see the process at work. Understand that Fresh WC had never seen the show before. He knew a bit about what was going on from skimming the Live Blogs I was posting every week, but compared to the other fans in the audience, he had really no idea what was going on. The fun of this show is really not what they’re doing, per se, but how each person does what we know they’re going to do. So jumping in at the end is really fruitless. He was playing ball anyway.

We arrived about 12p and they promptly served us lunch. It was not a good lunch, but it was free. By 12:30p we were being ushered into the soundstage. To warm up the crowd, they played the next to last episode of the show that hadn’t aired yet. Watching a new Bachelorette with 150 other fans was actually pretty fun. Again, Fresh WC was having trouble following along.

I told him that this whole ordeal was going to take about 3 hours or so. It’ll be like going to a long movie or something.

Now, 120 minutes in, we haven’t even started the taping. Knowing that the show is actually 2 hours and that they’ll probably have to film more than 2 hours to get 2 hours on air, I felt like I was going to be made into a huge liar. Long story short, we had dinner reservations at 9p with some friends and we had to basically escape this sound stage to make them, since the state directors weren’t letting anyone leave. We were there for a legit 7+ hours and the only time we actually saw Ashely, is when we were running out of the building and I tripped over an air duct and fell into her.

She smelled nice.

Oh, and did I mention that it was August in LA and we were in a soundstage with no AC? For about 7 hours or so? We did that.

The picture of Fresh WC’s face in the link above isn’t a cut-away shot of him reacting to some asshole thing Bentley was saying. No, that was pure hate for me. Because since there were only about 8 men in the entire audience, we were split up. So he suffered this agony alone.

Sorry buddy.

Next year, we’ll continue with some form of the Live Blogs for The Bachelor. Turns out, people enjoy those things. Just not Fresh WC.